Born in Tehran, Iran, Osheen's family stories are rife with colorful portraits of merchant sailors from Julfa, winemakers in Shiraz and once, even, his grandfather's insistence on bringing home a live lion to his home in Kolkata as a love-gift for his wife.

The stories paint a history both beautiful and tragic - all, seemingly, occurring by happenstance: a train crash in India that left his Italian grandmother orphaned in Odisha, a single recruitment that launched generations of violence in the Royal Gurkha Rifles, and, finally, the post revolution Iran-Iraq war that forced his family to leave everything behind.

His work uses biological processes and astronomical phenomenons to represent the complex relationship of memory, history and time that punctuate his family's history across India and Iran.In creating his own visual map of emotions and experiences, Osheen is, in a sense, stringing together a new version of history he has infused with his own understanding of the world around him.

In one photo, a surge before a breaking wave represents the quiet before landing into the chaos of life as a refugee; in another, Saturn's unique orbit overlaid into a Middle Eastern landscape captures his mother's experience of a forgotten, pre-revolutionary Persia.

"I always think of how the iron in our blood is made of the last gasp of a dying star, he says. "The end of one thing, in this way, creates the beginning of so many other things. Patterns in nature like that make up the very fabric of who we are."

If you look closely, you'll see that whether he's processing the epigenetic effects of of the Armenian Genocide, his childhood experience of war-fare, or his own grief over a lost life in the Middle East, Osheen is creating a vision of the world as fundamentally beautiful.